The Buckets by Greg Cravens for October 16, 2018

A: When they have to.

When they smell bacon.

As usual Eddie nails it.

Saying dogs and wolves are identical is tricky. Yes, there is only a 0.2 percent difference, but it’s a considerable difference to our benefit. Wolves do not domesticate, even when taken as pups. Wolves do not carefully follow our expressions and gestures. Dog pups do, without training or modeling. And wolves don’t handle gluten. Dogs and people do, suggesting that dogs changed to take advantage of human use of grains, casually as hunter-gatherers or intensively as farmers. Experience with other species makes it clear that over many generations without humans, dogs would slowly revert to wolves. But they are not “genetically identical.” That’s true even among humans. We can easily use DNA to differentiate one human from another. Even identical twins accumulate different mutations.

They change back when there is a full moon.

You might want to ask the crazy dog lady at Hubris.

During the full moon, Eddie, but only after midnight and in their dreams.